Thor's Day!--Deconstructing Common Core Prompts to Construct Reading Responses

It's Thor's Day! Time to take a peek at the Reading Lessons in my classrooms...

Many things frustrate teachers and parents when it comes to standardized testing. In the state of Illinois, the adoption of the Common Core Standards isn't something that truly upsets me (The Language Arts standards are clear and concise.) However, our state assessments are not as clearly defined.

Last year, teachers were prepared only with the "warning" that the ISAT would have a percentage of questions that were clearly Common Core. This year, we should be ready for a full-fledged testing based on these standards. Yet, if you visit the Illinois Board of Education site, you would find that the resources are lacking. The standards are there. In fact they are repeated in about five different "forms", but there are no clear references to scoring or practice questions. By gosh, Illinois! It is almost NOVEMBER!

Rant over...time to work it out.

Knowing that my students have been working hard, responding to tiered questions that I've modeled for them in class for weeks, I knew that it was time to step it up!

It was time to take the prompt apart and build it again from the pieces. Like learning to put together a model airplane, the students already had a good idea what a question and reading response should look like, but what I wanted them to do, was have the independent skill of taking all the pieces and reconstructing the knowledge for themselves.

First, we read and discussed three "wishes" stories. In our notes, students completed a chart comparing the wishes and general plot of all three.

I used "Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs, "The Third Wish" by Joan Aiken  and "Those Three Wishes" by Judith Gorog.

Today, I introduced Bloom's Taxonomy.

There are many varieties of the Bloom's Chart online. I chose this one so that we could identify (highlight) the group of Lower-Level thinking stems and Higher-Level thinking stems.

After a brief introduction and discussion of how each of these terms can be used in other subjects, we reviewed the basic construction of our previous reading response prompts and answers.

Here's what we decided that they all had in common:
     1. The Reading Responses opened with a QUESTION or COMMAND using a lower level verb. (Asking the reader to think about what they read or recall something.)
     2. The Reading Responses then asked a QUESTION or COMMANDED the reader to respond to what they read at a higher level. Often the reader needed to look at two of the text to answer.
     3. Required that the reader use evidence from the stories being referenced.

After I checked that everyone was clear about where these questioning strategies were coming from on the Bloom's chart, I set them to work. In small groups (no more than 4), they developed Reading Responses for the "wishes" stories that the other class would be answering.

As a teacher, I find it fulfilling to know that the students are excited for next week so that they can answer the questions that the other class has left for them!

Two Views on the "Top(ic) of the Week": The Core Curriculum and Reading Responses

On Wednesdays, my posts will be focused on a "topic" for the week and how it looks from two views (the past week and the upcoming week).

A look back on the past week's lessons:
My 8th grade Literature students THIS year are already benefiting from changes that I made with my 7th and 8th grade students LAST year. And it's all because of the Core Curriculum!

I know many teachers and parents are struggling with the Core Standards, but I've accepted the fact that these are the standards we will be teaching for the next decade or so. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't remind the students that every change, every "boost" of knowledge that I push, is backed by the state of Illinois's adoption of the Core Curriculum Standards.

Luckily, last year, my district agreed to purchased new Literature text sets for the 7th and 8th grades. I guaranteed my administrators that this series had the "Core at the center" and after using this series for a little over a year , I am very happy with it. (Holt McDougal Literature)

One "success" of this series is the follow-through on skills/questions/text throughout a story or unit. (The "blue" skill relates to the "blue" text questions and at the end, all ties to the extended responses and "blue" questions".) It's almost EASY to prepare the students when you have the proper tools!

A plan for the future:
I can foresee more work in store for my 7th grade students. During the first quarter, I've really hit this standard hard:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.7.1: Cite several pieces of textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

Here is an example of one of our prompts from last week: Reading Response Prompt for "Zebra" by Chaim Potok

However, my 7th graders still struggle paraphrasing and have a hard time explaining the text they choose to use as evidence. Again, the literature series helps me to prepare them well, but they are not using the writing stems to help them connect the text to the question and struggle using higher level thinking skills and INFERENCES!

As I plan for the upcoming weeks, I need to rethink how I check and develop these skills throughout our readings. If any readers have suggestions, please share! I'll post any insights that I find that work!